Last year I didn’t post much on my blog. So here again a post that is the first for this year. Let’s see if I can find the time to do more this year. Recently I am kept busy with Microsoft Azure and often switch between Mac OS and Windows. PowerShell is working great on Windows machines but I found it helpfull to be able to edit and run the scripts also on Mac OS. Keep in mind that not…

It’s a time ago I wrote something on my blog, so it is time again. In this post I want to explain how I build Microsoft NET core applications in an docker container and run them also as an docker. Since some time also Microsoft SQL server is available in an Linux docker container and that makes it an good combination with NET core and Entity Framework. Also I have one application running with NET Core 2.0 and Entity Framework…

When you want to be flexible with server monitoring data ElasticSearch is a good option to collect data. With the ElasticSearch queries you can be creative on which data you want to see. Also the Kibana kan help visualising data and making dashboards. In this blog post I will show you how this can be done. Docker First To build an example we will work with Docker. Of course you can set up ElasticSearch and Kibana directly on the OS….

A good start for 2018, I’ve got interviewed for BSD Magazine an it’s downloadable now: Celebrating Our 100th Issue The magazine contains technical articles and interviews with bloggers. Thanks to the editor(s) for the interview and publising the blog post. Have a good 2018 ,

We see it’s common to use Office365 in combination with the Active Directory synchronization tool. Even when you have more AD Domains it is possible to sync them to one Azure Active Directory tenant. When you use more AD domains you sometimes want to split the Office365 mail users in different groups and give them an own address list. Use PowerShell in Office365 Exchange Online To login on the Exchange online with Powershell use the following commands, use your Office365 admin…

The operating system OpenBSD is used widely for network routing and firewall. Also really easy to install for you Virtual Machine lab environment. In this blog bost I want to explain how to turn an OpenBSD installation quick in router and NAT with PF for your environment. This blog post will just explain the basic and for more advanced settings you can go from here. Install OpenBSD Make sure you create an new VM with at least 2 network interfaces,…

Finding perfomance bottlenecks on Linux can be easy done for CPU and Memory usage. The bottleneck is disk IO it seems more difficult to find the right tool for this. Luckely their is an easy way to read the disk IO statistics in Linux, try: This will give you the total amounts, this are the values: read I/Os requests number of read I/Os processed read merges requests number of read I/Os merged with in-queue I/O read sectors sectors number of sectors…

For the last year I have been busy with installing and configuring Octopus Deploy for different projects. One of the projects was to deploy Azure Web App. Before I created an deploy strategy with ‘msdeploy’ from an dedicated server. Since Octopus Deploy version 3.0 and higher it’s possible to select the Octopus Deploy server and start deployment to Azure Web App’s from there. Also it’s possible to have out of the box Azure deployment, I will use the Resource Manager…

To improve the docker ElasticSearch cluster I have posted here ElasticSearch cluster with Docker we can add memory improvements and monitoring. Memory It is recommend by ElasticSearch to disable any swap memory, since the docker for ElasticSearch is based on Ubuntu swap can be enabled inside the docker. To disable this add the following parameter in Docker run; Next to disabling the swap memory we can increase the ElasticSearch memory, default is 1GB but with this paramater (again in docker run) you…

While testing with new Proxy/IPS devices from Cisco SourceFire I was wondering if we could make an small program to check thumbprints on SSL certificates. What happens when you proxy SSL connection is that all information keeps hidden (that is the purpose). If you want to inspect that traffic you need to open before you send it forward to the original requester. In this process the SSL certificate will be changed and the thumbprint of the SSL certificate will give an…